AES E-Library

Interactive Granular Synthesis of Haptic Contact Sounds

The goal of this project is to automatically synthesise contact sounds such as scraping in continuous contact with a surface. This continuous information is much richer than simply triggering a sound sample. We investigated an 'ecological' granular synthesis algorithm and implemented it on a Windows PC using the OpenAL API and hardware acceleration on the soundcard. We integrated the algorithm into the Reachin Haptic API with haptic-audio latency below the 2ms threshold of perception. Using this system we found we could hear information such as the force, rate and timing of scraping gestures on the surface as well as properties such as stiffness, friction, roughness and bumpiness.